6 ms·

> Something that isn't talked much about IPv6 and I believe has subtle and indirect influence on it's adoption is that it is far far far less human-readable tha

> Something that isn't talked much about IPv6 and I believe has subtle and indirect influence on it's adoption is that it is far far far less human-readable than IPv4. No shit Sherlock: an IPv4 is 4 bytes. An IPv6 requires 16. This is four times as much data, it has to be less readable, that’s just the price of a bigger address space. Now one could have argued that 8 bytes, heck, even 6 bytes, would have been enough. I guess it would have, but having a /48, or even a /64 range, per user, is quite convenient: we can ditch the NAT (we probably won’t, but we can). But even then, 8, or even 6 bytes, remain harder to read than 4.

vasco 3y ago
The number of bytes isn't what makes it hard, "habanero eardrum" is 16 bytes and much easier to remember, there probably is a way to make ipv6 addresses easier to use, but hard to do now.
- porbelm 3y ago
  [prefix]::1 [prefix]::2 ... [prefix]::ffff Or if you want mnemonics on your /64: [prefix]::dead:beef:1 [prefix]::b00b:1 [prefix]::b00b:2 etc
- Jenda_ 3y ago
  "habanero eardrum" is actually less than 4 bytes -- let's say 12 bits for a common word (eardrum) + 16 bits for an uncommon word (habanero). If it were 16 bytes, the other options from the same 16-bytes space would be, for example, "\xa3\x80W%\xa3\x82\xa1\xea\x10\xf9\x8b\x07'\xf93J" or "\xf0\xef\x9b\x8f[0\xe5\xb9,\x0b\xd4^\xb00\xed\x00" (chosen by a fair /dev/urandom roll). If you want to convey 16 bytes using similar encoding, you need to use about 10 to 12 human words -- see for example Bitcoin wallet 12-word seed phrases or https://xkcd.com/936/ https://xkcd.com/936/ (xkcd correct horse battery staple). For IPv6, if your addresses are not SLAAC, but DHCP or manually assigned, you can go with half of it - the "random" part is the 64bit network prefix.
- jusssi 3y ago
  We just need to agree on a 2^16 word dictionary, each 16-bit segment gets it's own word. Then we can write addresses such as correct:horse:battery:staple::one .
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]

vasco 3y ago

The number of bytes isn't what makes it hard, "habanero eardrum" is 16 bytes and much easier to remember, there probably is a way to make ipv6 addresses easier to use, but hard to do now.

porbelm 3y ago
[prefix]::1 [prefix]::2 ... [prefix]::ffff Or if you want mnemonics on your /64: [prefix]::dead:beef:1 [prefix]::b00b:1 [prefix]::b00b:2 etc
Jenda_ 3y ago
"habanero eardrum" is actually less than 4 bytes -- let's say 12 bits for a common word (eardrum) + 16 bits for an uncommon word (habanero). If it were 16 bytes, the other options from the same 16-bytes space would be, for example, "\xa3\x80W%\xa3\x82\xa1\xea\x10\xf9\x8b\x07'\xf93J" or "\xf0\xef\x9b\x8f[0\xe5\xb9,\x0b\xd4^\xb00\xed\x00" (chosen by a fair /dev/urandom roll). If you want to convey 16 bytes using similar encoding, you need to use about 10 to 12 human words -- see for example Bitcoin wallet 12-word seed phrases or https://xkcd.com/936/ https://xkcd.com/936/ (xkcd correct horse battery staple). For IPv6, if your addresses are not SLAAC, but DHCP or manually assigned, you can go with half of it - the "random" part is the 64bit network prefix.
jusssi 3y ago
We just need to agree on a 2^16 word dictionary, each 16-bit segment gets it's own word. Then we can write addresses such as correct:horse:battery:staple::one .
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]